I’ve been curious to see when search engines were going to start exploring using neural networks for their search engine rankings. Microsoft at Searchification Day just announced that their new algorithm is able to understand the meaning between the words used in a keyword phrase:

The improved ranking algorithms use neural networking ranking that are loosely modeled from biological neural networks and can learn patterns that simple algorithms can’t. These algorithms can detect things like words pairs and are close to natural language queries (for instance, “what’s the hottest it’s ever been in AZ”). They note that for queries like this, Google returns pages with all of these words in them, but Live can now return better results because it can understand the relationship between words. [NOTE: This new Microsoft patent on ranking found by Bill Slawski is also interesting.

With only 69 million searchers in a month (vs. 104 million for Yahoo and 142 million for Google), and only 11% of queries (vs. 23% for Yahoo and 56% for Google) Microsoft knew it had to do something to improve its rankings.

I’m curious to see how this will be eventually implemented in the other search engines…

After going through a series of trainings on how to read web analytic reports, and how to create Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for your website, I’ve been struggling with how to explain the whole issue in an easy to understand way.

I am liberally copying his article here (with a few modifications, but these are not my unique thoughts) but feel free to visit the ClickZ Network for future articles about the subject.

So here’s his article:

Hang on to your calendars, the holiday party season has arrived. There’s your work party, your spouse’s work party, family gatherings (how many sides?), and the fun ones with friends. How many invitations did you receive on paper this year? My official count is zero (so far). Most have come by word of mouth or email — and a few of those through Evite. If you’ve ever used Evite, you’ve probably used Web analytics data without even realizing it.

Evite is an online service that allows you to invite people to an event and track their responses. When you receive the Evite invitation, you can easily add it to your Outlook calendar and request a reminder. For those of you new to Web analytics, here is a great example of how to use Web analytics data to make decisions.

Track Your Invite’s Success

I am planning a party and use Evite to send out invitations. After sending out an Evite, I can log in and see who has viewed the message and who hasn’t. I can see how many people have responded with a yes, no, or maybe. Say it’s been a week since I sent out the invite, and I notice my friend Shane hasn’t viewed the invitation. I can call Shane to make sure he knows about the party.

There you go, I’ve just used Web analytics data! I analyzed the responses to my Evite and found someone had not received it, so I picked up the phone and called him. By calling Shane, I just increased my holiday party conversion rate. This is a very simple example of using analytics to make decisions.

You can also set up the invitation to put the analytics information to work for you. When you set up the invite, ask Evite to send a reminder or follow-up email to those who haven’t responded by a certain number of days before the event. Now you have set the system up to take action based on recipients’ behaviors.

Bring It to Non-Profit

Now, take this same approach to your Web site by focusing on key site goals. Start small if you want. Take one of the key conversions on your site, such as (the sign up mechanism on your volunteer opportunity).

Look at how people are getting (or not getting) to your volunteer opportunity and signing up. Then ask questions such as:

What content or pages drive visitors to the opportunity?

What site pages or content could be optimized to help drive more interested volunteers?

What percentage of visitors move through the process to sign up for a volunteer opportunity?

Now that you understand this one process, look for additional opportunities to improve. Don’t look to solve all the site problems at once; just try increase this one conversion rate. Then you can look at additional factors, such as:

Do you need to get more people to your volunteer opportunities?

Can you improve your calls to action?

Do you need to increase the calls to action throughout the site to drive more people to your volunteer opportunities?

How can you convince (convert) people to sign up to volunteer once they arrive on the volunteer opportunity?

Do you have more than one problem?

Using Web analytics data to make decisions and take action doesn’t need to be hard. As you respond to those Evite invitations this year, just remember you’re probably already doing it.

I’ve been helping our friends at VolunteerLouisiana.gov develop inbound links, and I wanted to share with you the email that I sent to webmasters that is working to build traffic and links to their site:

Subject:

Developing a partnership to help New Orleans rebuild

Body:

Dear ,

I am writing to you on behalf of the Louisiana Association of Volunteer Centers and the Louisiana Office of the Lt. Governor. Both of these groups support

www.VolunteerLouisiana.gov and need more volunteers to sign up at the site to help with the long term recovery work that is being conducted by nonprofits that are using the system.

Would you be willing to place a link to their website www.VolunteerLouisiana.gov on your site encouraging people to sign up to volunteer?

If you use volunteers for your nonprofit, you can also get a free account to manage those volunteers by selecting “Create An Account” on their site.

Thank you in advance for your consideration and help in working together to rebuild New Orleans.

This includes when you upload .pdfs – label them starting with some of your keywords

LINKS
When building links for Yahoo concentrate on quality not quantity. Quality links would be one way links from sites that specialize in content directly relevant to the content on your own website.

So start with links from the community service section of university’s sites, from your nonprofit’s sites, from the “services” section of your local city’s site.

Considering my post yesterday was about you can use Gather.com to recruit older NPR type folks, I figured I would follow up with a post about how to use Facebook to promote your volunteer opportunities to a younger crowd.

So here we go.1. Create Personal Facebook account2. Join your regional/city network3. Create an event (on the left navigation). Make sure to pick which network to broadcast it to.4. You can either use Facebook’s guest list feature, or put the 1-800-Volunteer.org URL address for the volunteer opportunity in the “Description” field to track folks who have signed up.

Very simple. You’ve just reached out to a portion of the 34 million users that use Facebook.